Psycho has left the building. I write in the front room of my home in the desirable postcode of 1011 and look out over the fence to an empty house. Crown Removals came and took him away. Everyone expected it would be the cops. He was trouble, a rogue elephant gone mad among the Teslas and the Bentleys parked all along the length of the street – they’re just the runabouts, their best cars are in garages. We peered through our venetian blinds and saw him make his last stand. Texts were exchanged all along the length of the street. We were witnessing history.
Psycho was an unfortunate name but he lived up to it. Very many streets have a neighbour at war, an unruly resident, a bomb at the end of a short fuse – it’s the noise they make that drives the rest of us mad. The point of a neighbourhood is its quiet hours. We come home to rest. The rest of the world is a vast loud engine. Our houses are vows of silence. But the house of Psycho shook the whole damned street, from south (mums who brunch love the acai bowls at the corner cafe) to north (we share a corner with the most-expensive street in New Zealand). He was an engine of unstable rage, his amp turned to 11.
Psycho would go off. There was the time I watched him shouting at a security guard for 30 minutes and the time I watched him towering over a small neighbour in their shared driveway when he pushed him backwards while the small man’s wife screamed, and the time I watched him headbutt an older man who bought the house next door but sold it the following week. “He had a change of heart,” simpered the real estate guy when I had a look at the open home. Then there was the time he really went off, sometime after midnight, when I watched him punch a teenage boy in the face and scream, “N***rs! N***ers!” A bunch of white kids had been partying on the street. I asked one of them what was going on. “That guy just started going psycho,” he said. “That’s his name,” I said.
Psycho has a good lawyer. Everyone in 1011 has a good lawyer, including the lawyers. Psycho’s lawyer is my good friend Ron Mansfield KC. I texted Ron to advise him that his client had moved out and to ask for a trial date. He did not reply. There has been a much-delayed appearance for charges relating to an alleged incident in a nearby mansion in 2021. I attended a hearing two years ago at the Auckland District Court. I sat across from Psycho. We didn’t talk. We never did the whole time we were neighbours.
Psycho was about 50. He had got fat, and looked exhausted. He walked slow. Men fall apart; our centre cannot hold. That great prose stylist, Auckland writer Judith Baragwanath, knew him as a young man. “I remember a fresh-faced, innocent-looking boy who laughed a lot,” she told me, “and had nothing much to say for himself.”
Psycho had problems. He was psychotic. “Good riddance,” said the neighbours when we gathered to gossip, but there was something sad about his departure. A week after the Crown Removals truck came and went, the last of his possessions were collected by Junk2Go. We are all but a heartbeat away from being taken away by Junk2Go. A week after the Junk2Go truck came and went, there was one last vehicle at his door: Chemwaste. They flushed him away, drained the last drops of his existence. The street is very quiet these days. It has lost its edge. No one is in danger. But not a day goes by that I don’t think of Psycho and wonder how he is getting on, if he’s okay, where he has fished up, what his new neighbours think, and how he will pay Ron’s invoices. Go well, Psycho.
